


Tear Asunder

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Series: Hell of a Town [3]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Magic, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-26 18:38:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/968962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair and Jim are together, have been that way for ten years.  Someone wants them separated.</p><p>A ten years after time-stamp story for my AU story Hell of a Town.  If you don't know that story this won't make much sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tear Asunder

**Author's Note:**

> I debated whether this should be teen rated or mature rated, but in the end I went with mature because Jim says 'fuck' a lot in this story. He has reason, regrettably.

Even if Jim hadn’t been a sentinel, he’d walked this stretch of the magic quarter so many times that struck blind he’d still know where he was: by the sounds all around him, by the smells in the air, by the feel of the ground beneath his feet. There was the looming bulk of the old post office, five storeys high, its Edwardian brashness barely tempered by the plainer buildings nearby. There were the little stores at street level, mashing food shops with magic shops with tacky discount shops, amid the long breaks of empty retail that had been turned to apartments by the simple expedient of hanging a sheet across the plate glass. Behind the old post office was the still empty site of the former town hall, built in arrogant hope in 1896 and gone in the events of 1944 that led to Cascade’s moneyed abandoning the old town hub for a new area some five miles away.

He halted at one corner, looking down Wesley and Third, knowing that the wind above the buildings was actually a north wind despite the way it funnelled though here, and grimaced in distaste at the scent of garbage.

Maybe not just the garbage. Old Henry shuffled past, saluting Jim with a shaky hand. “Mr Ellison. Good times are coming, yes they are.”

“So I’ve heard, Henry,” Jim said softly, and smiled. Old Henry was crazy but if he said that bad times were coming Jim always passed it on to Blair, because Old Henry, broken though he might be, was a reliable seer. Henry walked on and Jim stopped holding his breath, and ducked into Millie’s for a coffee.

“Everything good, Jude?”

“If it’s not, I’ll tell you,” Jude replied, the same as he always did. “You want your usual?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Jim said, and handed over his cash in return for a heavy stone-ware cup of a black coffee strong enough to melt teeth enamel. Jim took a long, satisfied sip. “God, I needed that.”

Jude grinned. “It’s cold, despite that pretty yellow thing up in the sky.”

“When the wind settles maybe there’ll be some more warmth in the air.” That was the end of conversation. Another customer came in, and Jim retired to a corner table and stared out the window while he drank his brew.

If someone had told him ten years ago that a coffee shop well into the magic quarter would be his regular morning stopping place he’d have laughed in their face. Five years ago, even; but then times changed.

His phone began playing the opening bars of Nirvana’s Lithium – the latest ring-tone that Blair had installed to identify any calls from him. Jim accused him of putting the worst possible songs on his phone so that Jim would answer as soon as possible, and then Blair would accuse him of having no sense of musical history. It was an old, repetitive, much-loved tease between the two of them, renewed as often as Blair changed the music. “Yeah, Chief, what is it?”

“Are you close to the office?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Well, precisely speaking, there is no immediate emergency, but yes, I need to see you about something important and the sooner the better.”

“I’m about ten minutes away,” Jim said, and gulped down the last of his coffee.

~*~

Seven minutes had passed when Jim barged through the street entrance of the ‘office’, through the waiting room with its shabby chairs and luxuriant plants and abstract wall-hangings and paper-strewn notice board, and into the second room.

Blair sat on his crappy old desk chair. A woman that Jim didn’t know sat in one of the two armchairs. She was plainly dressed in jeans and a hooded rain-jacket, but Jim knew a $300 hair-do when he saw one, and those shoes never willingly walked magic quarter sidewalks. She had two envelopes in her lap, one flat and letter paper sized, the other a narrow, yellow rectangle of a padded envelope, the flap open and revealing the edge of the bubble wrap. The woman’s face suggested she was maybe in her forties – the hands that carefully held the envelopes suggested an age closer to sixty.

Blair looked up and smiled at him, but Jim knew Blair’s smiles, and this wasn’t a good one. It was determinedly cheerful, determinedly loving, and hiding distress. “Jim, this is Verona McAndrew.”

“Ms McAndrew.” Jim nodded, and on impulse, didn’t sit down, but stood behind Blair and placed his hands on his shoulders. They were tight with tension, but Blair relaxed slightly at Jim’s touch.

“Verona,” Blair said. “I’m sorry to make you repeat yourself, but can you please tell Jim what you’ve just told me?”

Verona McAndrew was definitely closer to sixty than forty – a straight, slim back and cunningly styled hair couldn’t hide that when she looked you in the face. Her gaze moved between Jim and Blair as she spoke in the tones of an educated woman trained to speak in public. “I’m the Chairwoman of the First Women’s Guild of Cascade.” Jim’s brows lifted. The announcement of her title made her an amazingly unlikely person to approach Blair. “And some five months ago, a junior member of my guild was asked to create a tool to manage a sundering. There were elements of the request that were a little out of the usual, but the man commissioning the tool was someone known to my guild member and so she took the materials provided, and undertook the work. She’s young, but she’s very gifted. She made an object of power.” 

Carefully, she drew a knife out of the envelope. It was a plain kitchen knife, about eight inches long from the base of the handle to the tip of the blade. It was a good quality knife, a hell of a lot like the ones in a set in Jim and Blair’s own kitchen, in fact, almost exactly like...

“We had a knife like that,” Jim said. “I figured I must have accidentally thrown it out in the trash.” He remembered how pissed off he’d been when he couldn’t find it. The knife was unadorned and unchanged. No-one had carved pentangles into the haft or etched symbols on the blade. But wrapped around the blade was a plain piece of black elastic – one of Blair’s hair-ties. And wrapped around the haft was a strip of woven fabric, cotton maybe, and a lot like the pattern of a pair of Jim’s old boxers. Cold washed over his skin and the hairs on the back of his neck lifted. 

Verona’s eyes were sympathetic and embarrassed, but Jim could smell the anger underneath the courtesy. “A sundering is meant to free someone from an unwanted bond, or an ugly memory. A third party should not commission a sundering.”

“But somebody did,” Jim said. “And your little guild member went along with it.”

Verona’s anger flipped over the surface of sympathy. “My guild member realised that something was desperately wrong and in the face of tremendous pressure from a respected man many years her senior she did the right thing and came to me.” She sighed. It reminded Jim of Blair, of Naomi, and of how they would push away unwanted emotion. “Are you familiar with the mechanics of a sundering, Mr Ellison?”

Jim’s hands were still on Blair, not offering support any longer but clawed harshly into his shoulders. Without a word, Blair reached a hand across his chest and covered one of Jim’s. Blair’s other hand sat in his lap, curled into a fist.

“When I studied, we were looking at techniques more on the defensive than the psychological side of things.” Jim’s voice was sharp with sarcasm.

“The tool is made but to activate it, as it were, it has to be instrumental in the destruction of something symbolic of whatever it is that’s to be ended – an unfortunate love, a harmful obsession. Photographs are often commonly used for the task. This is the one that was given to my guild member.” 

Verona’s right hand still held the knife. With her left hand she passed the other envelope across the space to Blair. He took it. The hand holding Jim’s was gone, and Blair opened the envelope. In it was a picture that Jim could go the rest of his life without seeing again – the notorious picture of the day of the Hunt, the picture of Blair carrying Jim’s ripped and broken body away from the dogs. Blair must have known what would be inside the envelope, the import of it if not the specific content, but Jim heard his breath hitch anyway. Shock? Anger? Jim had more than enough of both.

Blair’s voice was a growl, like the wolf that kept him company sometimes. “What do we have to do with these things to be safe?”

Verona sat up a little straighter in her chair. “The picture is no more than a picture. Dispose of it how you see fit. There is a procedure for the knife, which we’ll begin here. Part of it must be done by you. The remainder – you could take the knife, I’m sure that you know methods that will cleanse it but they’ll be painful to the tool’s creator. If you’ll trust me – we can make it, not easy for her, but easier at least.”

Jim didn’t want it easy. There was a white fury in him that hoped that everyone involved in this mess suffered long and hard, and he was silent while he fought with it. Whoever had commissioned this ‘tool’ would have condemned Blair to death. Jim didn’t need to have studied the mechanics of the magic working to understand the principle. Something of his on the haft, something of Blair’s about the blade, and if this had worked, in time he would have... what? Cast Blair out of his life? Forgotten him? And would Blair have gone quietly, apathetically, despite the fact that without Jim, Blair would die? A lot of things had changed in ten years, but that remained a constant. Whoever paid for this ugly thing probably didn’t intend that. In fact, Jim was sure that they hadn’t. But Blair’s death would have been the end of it.

“...Jim!”

“What?”

Blair had gotten out of his chair; he was standing in front of Jim with his hands curled around Jim’s arms, and Jim had barely noticed it. “We need an answer, man. Are you willing to trust Verona with this?”

Jim wanted to spit out ‘Hell, no!’ But instead he asked, “Are you?”

Blair nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. It’s not the fault of the woman who made this, Jim. She did the right thing in the end, and she shouldn’t have to suffer for it any more than she has to.”

Jim was going to break his teeth, maybe his jaw. He managed to nod. “Okay.”

Blair nodded also. “Okay,” he said, another mirroring of Jim, and then turned to Verona. “So what do we have to do?”

Verona stood, the knife still in her right hand. The envelope, put aside, fell to the floor. “This would be your hair tie, Mr Sandburg?

“Yes.”

“Then Mr Ellison – you will remove it from the blade.”

Jim stepped forward, eyeing the knife like the poisonous thing that it was. “I guess it would be ideal if I didn’t handle this in any way that might cut the elastic?”

Verona’s voice was dry. “That would be wise, yes.”

Jim had deft hands, and the band wasn’t wrapped tightly around the blade. The job was done, and on an impulse, he twisted the band to fit and pushed it on his left ring finger. Verona nodded, and then looked at Blair.

“I’m afraid your task is the more tricky. The knot is tight, and as with the band, you don’t want to actually cut the fabric.”

Blair grinned, rueful. “I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t bite my nails.” He bent to the task as Verona held the knife by the blade. It took a long, frustrating time, and then with a small noise of triumph, Blair loosened the knot and unwound the fabric. It dangled from his hand, a strip of ragged fabric, and then Blair shrugged and said, “Since Jim has my hair tie...” and reached behind his head to gather his hair into a tail and tie it with the cotton. “So that’s it?”

“Not quite. But it’s all that you yourselves must do. The tokens have no more power now. You can do what you like with them.”

“Until whoever did this tries again,” Blair said bitterly.

Verona stooped to pick up the envelope so that she could replace the knife there. Out of sight, out of mind. If only that was possible. Upright again, she made a ‘who knows?’ gesture. “We did try to impress upon the people who commissioned this item that there might have been effects they didn’t expect. For my guild member especially, but for them too, as well as for you. Attempting a veiled curse on the Speaker and the Scarred Man?” Blair’s face showed clear surprise that she knew those particular epithets and Verona smiled, thin-lipped and not particularly amused. “Guilds keep themselves apart, Mr Sandburg, not ignorant. The possibilities... truly, I shuddered. But you can’t explain these things to the non-gifted. They see the pretty lights and toys, and have no more understanding of the dangers than a baby putting its finger in a power socket.”

A fresh wave of fury surged through Jim but rather than the hot emotion of earlier, it was sickly, and he kept silent. He left it to Blair to make the strained courtesies of goodbye, with all of them glad to see the back of each other. He perched on the corner of Blair’s desk, his arms crossed as he tried not to think, not to know, and heard Verona leave, heard Blair shut the door out to the street and come back to the inner office.

“Well, that was fun. Not.” 

“No.”

There was silence. Then Blair said, “Jim, I think that it’s fair to say that if someone who hated us could get close enough to get the makings of that... _thing_ then they didn’t actually need to make the thing. You, uh, you get what I mean?”

Jim shut his eyes. “Just say it, Sandburg.”

Blair sounded almost close to tears. “I can’t. I can’t. You have to.”

Jim couldn’t look at Blair. Instead of anger, grief and shame swallowed him and he thrust into his pocket and pulled out his phone and called a number that he had on speed dial. He waited and then his brother answered. “Hey, Steven.”

“Jim. Hi there.” His brother sounded just fine. Welcoming. Not guilty or anxious, and Jim forged words into venom.

“I know you must have been in on it, Stevie. Because you’re the one who has our key. What were you going to do? Tape it under our dining table? Under our fucking bed? Were you going to maybe forget a sweater one day so that you had an excuse to call in when we weren’t there?”

“Jim, listen to me...” Steven sounded scared now, but not confused. 

Jim’s voice kept rising in a storming roar. “You think that you and Dad were dead to me before? That’s nothing, Steven. It was fucking nothing! Nothing! You’re buried six feet deep, for as long as I fucking live, you understand me! Fucking dead, Stevie! You _and_ that old bastard!”

“Jim, come on, hey...” Blair was in his face, what was he doing, Jim had business here. But when Blair’s hand closed about his cell phone and took it away and turned it off, Jim didn’t struggle. He just stood there, gasping for breath that he couldn’t find. There were tears on his face. He made a useless gesture with his hand, and Blair’s arms enveloped him. Maybe there were tears on Blair’s face too. Jim couldn’t tell.

Blair lifted his head eventually; he was stricken equally with grief and confusion. “I thought...” He struggled for words. “I didn’t think that they liked me, but I didn’t think that they hated me. I thought things were okay.”

Jim’s legs were shaky and he sat back down on Blair’s desk. “It’s not you.”

“Oh fuck’s sake, Jim, of course it’s me!”

Jim fumbled for Blair’s hands and took them in his. “What I mean is... Look, Dad was pissed when I had to leave PD.”

“Well, duh, Jim. But I would have hoped it was because of the asshole system that forced you out...”

“Nobody forced me out, Chief. I had to make a choice who I stood by, and you know who that is. PD might have been a touch blue collar for Dad’s preferences,” –bitterness coated Jim’s tongue- “but it was still respectable. Reputable.”

“And we’re back to me again.” 

Blair was angry, but Jim knew the wellspring of the anger, knew that it was Blair’s own insecurities and fears and shame. He squeezed Blair’s hands more tightly, as he tiredly traced back the thread of choices, his own, and Steven’s and his father’s.

“Last Christmas, Steven and I were looking at some family albums. We were in the upstairs bedroom and sitting opposite an old dresser with a mirror, and Steven looked up at the both of us and he said, “My god, you look years younger than me.” Blair’s face, if anything, became even more haunted and miserable.

“I don’t care, Chief. If it means we run the race together to the end, I’m not going to complain about the length of the course. “ He let go of Blair’s hands, but only to cup his face: Blair’s face, which still looked like that of a young man in his early twenties. No more than you’d expect for an incubus. It was too soon since the Powers came to judge how long an incubus ought to live, but everyone knew that they didn’t age. But ten years with Blair ought to have seen deeper lines on Jim’s face, and a little grey hair and a lot _less_ hair, and instead Steven looked well and truly the elder brother.

“Dad and Steven – they can see me changing, or not changing or whatever, and they got scared. They got scared and they did something stupid and I will never, ever forgive them for it. Even if they don’t know about how you need me, they know that I love you, and you are not some fucking cult that I need to be deprogrammed from....” His voice shook.

“I’m sorry,” Blair said.

“You've got nothing to be sorry for.”

Blair moved in closer and they clung together a while. Jim stroked Blair’s hair, and then he pulled the cotton material away so that Blair’s hair hung loose again, and he took off the elastic on his finger (it left red marks that would soon fade) and he tangled the elastic and the old strip of cotton together in a complicated, messy knot and dropped it into the cracked mug that held Blair’s pens and pencils.

~*~

Cascade and the magic quarter and work could wait a day. They went home: to grieve; to change their locks; but they went home together.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing TS fic for ten years, ten happy years generally, and I wanted to mark the occasion. Despite knowing that I wanted to write a story by a certain date, I struggled to get an idea, any idea, and this came to me at the last minute, or the last forty-eight hours anyway. Hopefully, that doesn't show.
> 
> T Verano also decided to mark the occasion, and she wrote me the most wonderful story. Because she knows that my tastes can be dark and twisty she wrote me a death story of utterly miserable bleakness. I loved it. If you like that sort of thing too, her story can be found here:
> 
> http://t-verano.livejournal.com/72744.html


End file.
